The present invention relates to computer databases and, more particularly, to database modules and computer program products that disguise data structures in computer databases.
Cooperation among enterprises and governmental agencies often requires the sharing of private (confidential) microdata to support flexible and ad hoc aggregate analyses, and which may provide significant advantages over the use of pre-computed aggregates. Due to privacy concerns, microdata may need to be transformed to prevent discovery of any individual's sensitive attribute values. Some privacy models and techniques have been proposed to disguise microdata.
The approaches proposed thus far do model an attacker's background knowledge, which directly affects what can be inferred about individuals from the published microdata. Accordingly, these approaches can be subject to privacy breaches when attackers exploit public knowledge such as the correlation between quasi-identifiers and sensitive attributes.